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News deserts are an oasis
replies
The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern sounded an alarm recently.
Its press release said, “The loss of local newspapers accelerated in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than 200 counties as news deserts and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information, researchers at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University have found.”
(Snip) It’s a crisis for democracy — not to mention journalism schools that rely on journalism students. Without newspapers, demand for journalism classes should drop.
Former President Donald Trump was greeted with cheers Thursday as he delivered pizzas to a Manhattan firehouse after spending the day in court.
Trump, 77, arrived at FDNY’s Engine Co. 8, Ladder Co. 2 in Midtown with two Xeno’s Pizza boxes in hand at around 5:30 p.m.
The campaign had dropped off 10 boxes of different pizzas, including pepperoni, for the hungry first responders prior to his arrival. (Photo) “You gotta win!” one firefighter told Trump as he met with the battalion.
Former President Donald Trump has laid out the most concrete timeline yet for when he might select his running mate for the 2024 Republican ticket.
“I’ll be picking, but probably not too much before the convention, which I happen to be having in the great state of Wisconsin,” the presumptive GOP nominee told FOX 6 Milwaukee during a campaign visit to the battleground state Wednesday.
The Republican National Convention will be held in Milwaukee July 15-18. Traditionally, the vice presidential nominee will address the delegates on the penultimate night of the gathering.
In 2016, Trump picked then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate in the final week before the convention,
Elite higher education in America -- long unquestioned as globally preeminent -- is facing a perfect storm.
Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system. The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor's degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.
No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.
Colombia and Israel break up
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Colombia President Gustavo Petro on Wednesday said he intends to end diplomatic relations with Israel over its handling of its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Petro said he’s ending relations with Israel as of Thursday due to ‘the girls, the boys, the babies who have died dismembered by the bombs,’ The Hill reported.
Petro announced his intention during Colombia’s annual May Day celebration at the central Plaza de Bolivar in Bogota.
‘The times of genocide, of the extermination of an entire people, cannot come before our eyes, before our passivity,’ Petro said, according to the New York Times.
He said the death of Palestine would be the death of humanity.
Democratic lawmakers are sounding the alarm over what they see as conservative justices and judges tipping the scales in favor of former President Trump in two federal cases.
The two cases accuse the former president of attempting to subvert the 2020 election and obstructing justice related to his handling of classified documents. Some Democratic senators suggest conservative justices on the Supreme Court are playing politics by slow-walking special counsel Jack Smith’s case related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, so that there’s no chance of it reaching a verdict before Election Day.
Trump is on trial in NYC over an alleged $130,000 payment to Daniels to keep her quiet during the 2016 election — which he has denied.
On Thursday night, Avenatti tweeted, “Keith Davidson is lying. After I confronted her w/ her own text msgs, Daniels admitted to me in early 2019 that she & Davidson had extorted Trump in Oct. 2016 – it was a shakedown. This was one of the many reasons I fired her as a client in Feb. 2019.”
Davidson testified in court on Thursday with his version of the events surrounding the supposed “hush money”
A new poll from Kaplan Strategies shows Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by 15 points in Michigan, a state that Biden won in 2020.
Is this poll an outlier? Other polls have shown Trump with an edge in Michigan, but not by this much.
Either way, this has got to strike fear in the hearts of Democrats. Six months ahead of the November election, former President Donald Trump is leading Democrat incumbent Joe Biden by a whopping 15 points in Michigan, a key swing state. According to a Kaplan Strategies survey, the former president polled 51 percent to 36 percent in the battleground state.
Currently, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has a hold on some conservatives because he was opposed to vaccines. However, being right about one thing doesn’t mean RFK Jr. is right about all things or even many things. In fact, as an unearthed clip from 2005 shows, RFK Jr., in common with the rest of the Democrat party, thinks conservatives are violent and immoral. The problem, though, is that there are serious logical flaws underlying his claims.
MxM News unearthed RFK Jr.’s scathing red state indictment—and do keep in mind that he’s never walked any of this back, something that would indicate that he’s grown in wisdom or lessened in prejudice:
Happy Friday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Delrubbyn felt that his cabbage and cardamom wine should have been a bigger hit at the Tri-County Kilt-Weaver Olympics.
For years, the Democrats have been singularly obsessed with ruining Donald Trump's life. He is their White Whale. Much to their chagrin, Trump continues to refuse to have his life ruined by them.
According to the Democrats' playbook and wildest dreams, these are supposed to be Trump's darkest days. He's in court rather than on the campaign trail, surrounded by biased jackals who have thrown judicial integrity down a toilet.
They're not very competent jackals. This is from a post Matt wrote yesterday:
Hamas sees Western countries such as Germany as a refuge in which the organization can concentrate on collecting donations, recruiting new supporters, and spreading its propaganda." — Germany's domestic intelligence service, apnews.com, November 23, 2023.
In February, Belgium's justice minister confirmed that Hamas operates in Brussels... through a network of front companies raising funds for the terrorist organization... Belgian authorities nevertheless continue to allow Hamas to operate there.
"Hamas has been in Europe for about 30 years. It's an open secret. Of course, they don't call themselves Hamas...
President Biden, urged by allies and detractors to speak out about pro-Palestinian demonstrations coast-to-coast, used the White House on Thursday as his backdrop to blast protesters who use violence and vandalism to make their points at colleges and universities. If he’s worried about alienating young voters over policy in Gaza, Biden did not let it show in his stern prepared remarks, arguing it was not a time to play politics. Protesters will not alter his support for Israel and condemnations of Hamas, he said, nor will he react by deploying the National Guard to disperse demonstrators who are otherwise being dealt with by university administrators and local police.
Joshua Dean, a Boeing whistleblower who warned of manufacturing defects in the planemaker’s 737 Max, has died after a short illness, the second Boeing whistleblower to die this year.
Dean, 45, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alleging “serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management of the 737 production line” at Spirit.
In 2018 and 2019, two 737 Max planes were involved in fatal crashes, which killed 346 people. Dean was fired by Spirit last year, and filed a complaint with the Department of Labor alleging that his termination was in retaliation for raising safety concerns.
The New York City mayor, Eric Adams, remains under pressure to divulge how many of the 282 people arrested at campus protests in Manhattan on Tuesday night were non-students after repeatedly claiming that “outside agitators” were responsible for escalations that prompted an overwhelming law enforcement crackdown. Adams, a Democrat and former city police officer, was asked by local reporters on Thursday morning to give a breakdown of the arrest numbers. He repeatedly declined to provide details. On a local Fox News channel, Adams was asked to provide firm details but instead gave an analogy: “If you have one bad professor educating 30, 40, 50 college students with inappropriate actions,
Biden administration says 100,000 new
migrants are expected to enroll in ‘Obamacare’
next year replies
migrants are expected to enroll in ‘Obamacare’
next year replies
Roughly 100,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children are expected to enroll in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance next year under a new directive the Biden administration released Friday.
The move took longer than promised to finalize and fell short of Democratic President Joe Biden’s initial proposal to allow those migrants to sign up for Medicaid, the health insurance program that provides nearly free coverage for the nation’s poorest people.
But it will allow thousands of migrants to access lucrative tax breaks when they sign up for coverage after the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace enrollment opens Nov. 1, just days ahead of the presidential election.
As we've previously documented, the Biden White House has employed a new strategy in recent weeks designed to make the way President Joe Biden shuffles when he walks across the South Lawn a little less noticeable to the public.
It's what I call "Operation Hide Joe Biden," and up until Thursday, the hiding consisted of his handlers swarming him as he either walked towards or away from Marine One, making it harder for him to be visible and in some instances effectively making it impossible to see him.
"Some Biden advisers have told Axios they're concerned that videos of Biden walking and shuffling alone — especially across the grass —
The unexpected, under-the-radar Senate
race in Michigan that could determine
control of the chamber replies
race in Michigan that could determine
control of the chamber replies
Elissa Slotkin had less than half an hour to reckon with a retirement announcement that would reshape Michigan’s political landscape. The state’s senior senator and the third-ranking Democrat in the chamber, Debbie Stabenow, was about to reveal that she would retire in 2024.
Rep. Slotkin, a Democratic congresswoman from Holly, soon met with her team to mobilize for a run at a U.S. Senate seat that Democrats had not expected would be hard to defend in the narrowly divided chamber. A powerhouse fundraiser who had won in one of the nation’s most contested House districts,
Senator J.D. Vance schooled and shut down CNN leftist Kaitlan Collins after she tried to ambush him with gotcha questions on the garbage criminal prosecutions of President Trump.
On Wednesday evening, Vance was a guest on Collins’s eponymous show, The Source with Kaitlan Collins, to discuss various topics, including the pro-Hamas protests on college campuses across America and whether he would serve as Trump’s vice president. However, things got heated when the subject turned to Trump’s political prosecutions.
After one leading question from Collins, Vance unloaded on Biden’s Department of Injustice. He pointed out how “unusual” it was for the DOJ to collude with communist Manhattan DA Alkving Bragg’s office
President Trump filed an unsealed motion to dismiss Jack Smith’s classified documents case for vindictive and selective prosecution.
The motion was originally filed under seal in February. Judge Cannon authorized Trump to file an unsealed version of the motion to dismiss Jack Smith’s case.
Trump’s legal team in February filed several motions to dismiss Jack Smith’s classified documents case.
Judge Cannon previously denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the classified docs case on ‘unconstitutional vagueness’ of the Espionage Act, however, a third motion based on selective prosecution is still pending.
China’s state-linked electronics giant Huawei has reportedly been “secretly funding cutting-edge research at American universities” through a Washington-based nonprofit called the Optica Foundation.
A Bloomberg News report on Thursday said Huawei is the sole funding source for a research competition administered by the Optica Foundation, which is in turn managed by a professional association that specializes in visible-light technologies such as fiber optics and lasers. The competition offers a hefty million-dollar reward for optical research projects and receives hundreds of submissions each year.
President Joe Biden is the last person who should be quoting scripture, social media users said on Thursday, after Biden posted a message for the National Day of Prayer, referencing scripture while spending the last few days promoting the murder of unborn children.
On the National Day of Prayer, Biden wrote, “Scripture tells us to rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, and be constant in prayer.” “On this National Day of Prayer, my prayer is that we keep faith that our best days are ahead of us and continue to believe in honesty, decency, dignity, and respect,” he said in a message
The Taliban junta is putting some effort into reviving tourism in Afghanistan, which seemed like an unlikely vacation getaway even before a band of hardcore Islamist fanatics took control of the country in 2021.
The Associated Press (AP) on Tuesday marveled that Afghanistan does have a functional tourism industry, even though its current rulers are “pariahs on the global stage, largely because of their restrictions on women and girls.”
PORTLAND, Ore. — A public fountain in Portland’s South Park Blocks that depicts a scene from the Torah and the Old Testament and was donated to the City of Portland by Jewish Immigrant Joseph Shemanski in 1926, was vandalized in early March, city officials say. Portland Parks & Recreation spokesperson Mark Ross told KOIN 6 News that Shemanski Fountain’s stone base was chipped away and two of the fountain’s three bronze bowls were stolen. The City of Portland filed a vandalism report on March 4 after city employees noticed the damages. “PP&R maintains the fountain and Portland Water Bureau owns
The Biden administration helped guide roughly $1.3 million to the Taliban through a weapons removal program since September 2021, according to an April 30 inspector general report.
Taliban entities received funds from partners working with the State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement in Afghanistan, including $138,000 in this quarter, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR) recent report. SIGAR’s report documents how the head of the Taliban has defended Sharia law, including “publicly flogging and stoning women for committing adultery,” as well as how other terrorist groups, like ISIS-K, are proliferating in the region.